{Insert SomethingWittyHere}

Personal Cheer Squad. Having someone willing to go "hey do the thing" is super helpful. My friend group is a bunch of nerds so if anyone messages the group chat with "I need an oendon" we will all immediately post photos of ourselves doing silly poses and send a bunch of encouraging messages and emoji spam. Which is basically the plot of the Oendon/Elite Beat Agents game series. There are people cheering for you! You can do it! Also for smaller stuff I have a guy in my house (we are married) and we both remind each other/encourage each other to get shit done.

Stop asking if you want to do it. Start saying you want to have it done. Do I want to wash the dishes? No. Cleaning sucks. But I want to have clean things. Say it out loud. "I want to have clean dishes." Visualize the result rather than the process as you get started.

Just Five Minutes. Promise yourself that you can quit if it really sucks. Five minutes isn't so bad. You can handle just five minutes. Set a five minute timer. Hit whatever it is as hard as you can. After five minutes, you can decide to keep going or you can take a break and come back later. If you do quit, that five minutes still made it easier for next time.

Add fun. Have a treat in easy reach as you work. Play your favorite music or podcast or have a show going in the background. Light the scented candle. Dilute your misery of doing the task with pleasure.

Mix and match! Always keep looking for new tricks, new treats, and novel ways of completing your tasks to keep from getting in a rut.

It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.

It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.

it is fun, because when he's a brain slug in a Canadian setting, he has the ability to 'mask'. because he's puppeting someone's body and wrapped around their brain, and he can use what's left of their mind to smooth out any social situations.

US: Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Rarewaves.com

UK: Waterstones, Forbidden Planet, Amazon.uk, Hatchards, Bookshop.org

Canada: Amazon, Rarewaves.com, Indigo

Australia: Readings

Germany: KulturKaufhaus, Thalia

Luxembourg: Ernster

Poland: ritso.eu

France: Fnac

Denmark: William Dam Boghandel

Netherlands: donner.nl

Spain: Casa del Libro

Sweden: Adlibris

Switzerland: Orell Fussli

Lithuania: Knygos

South Korea: yes24

Mexico: Alma Libre Bookstore

I think part of what is making young people lonelier, in discussing why they're increasingly isolated, is that they're so afraid of meeting someone who doesn't hold their same beliefs, and instead of being just core beliefs it is kinda ancillary shit.

It's actually okay to disagree even on social topics! Even on some political ones! But I mean, online you can start with "i love this mutual but they have a really bad/uninformed opinion about x media"

I know this is IMMEDIATELY going to be taken in bad faith, and yes babygirl, you are so right, I DO want you to go make best friends with both the KKK grand wizard AND your nearest nazi leader.

But seriously, as someone who has spent two decades doing community organization: finding ways to connect with different people is so so so important. There are people i follow here who ate 80% smart and their brain falls out of their head 20% of the time and that is GOOD FOR MY MENTAL ECOSYSTEM AND GOOD FOR LEARNING HOW TO BE A PERSON

but the funniest part of this is not that they were debating the exile of a man who has been dead for over 500 years.

found the post. to be fair to them. not the most egregious thing said on this post, but they did endorse the rest of it so.

ignoring "horny frat boys" being an insane way to describe percy, byron, and polidori, not to mention poor fucking claire lmao. theres a pervasive issue of people really wanting mary shelley's life and career to be a story of a woman being greatly underestimated and silenced by her (male) peers but persevering nonetheless and this idea is generally pushed in popular culture and by some ill informed biographers to the point that it is just no longer reflective of her actual experiences. i think people forget a lot that mary shelley existed in radical circles that, while not devoid of misogyny, had moved past the idea that women shouldn't have opinions and be writing and have lives outside of their relationships with men and who certainly were not discouraging her from pursuing a career in writing. she was deeply admired for being the daughter of wollstonecraft and godwin and then as a writer in her own right, and i think its sad that this idea that she was discouraged from pursuing writing by the men in her life, especially by her husband, is so pervasive because one of the most interesting things about her social group to me is the creative relationships built among them. people joke a lot that percy shelley is just remembered as the wife of the author of frankenstien as a diss on him but everything he is on record saying about her work implies that he would be fucking honored. they had a deep creative partnership and mutual admiration for one another's work that was much stronger than even their romantic relationship and its deeply frustrating how that is often disregarded and put down because people are so fixated on this stereotype of how they think 19th century women should exist that they dont let themselves engage with what her life was actually like.